I presented my paper ‘We Never Had Colonies’: Episodes in the Global Histories of Colonialism and Anti-Colonialism in Hungary before the Second World War at the academic conference Colonial Entanglements in Central and Eastern Europe before 1939 organized by Agata Łuksza and Łukasz Zaremba on 4–5 September 2023 at the Institute of Polish Culture, University of Warsaw (IKP UW) in cooperation with Leibniz ScienceCampus ‘Eastern Europe – Global Area’ (EEGA).
Programme
Day 1 (4th Sept.)
Session 1A, 10:oo–12:15
# Introduction by the organizers: Agata Łuksza, Łukasz Zaremba, Institute of Polish Culture, University of Warsaw
# Ben Dew, Polish Historical Writing in Britain, 1830-1918: Conceptualising Empire
# Agata Łuksza, Black Effigies in the Nineteenth-Century Polish Culture. Methodological Reflections on Racial Fantasies and Performative Blackness in the Absence of Afro-Diasporic People
# Dagnosław Demski, Whose Legacy is it? Tracing Ethnographic Shows in Central and Eastern Europe
Session 1B 12:3o–1:45
Artist talk (information about the artists and summaries of their presentation will be added to the final schedule):
# Weronika Szczawińska
# Janek Simon
Lunch
Session 1C 3:3o–5:3o
# James Mark, Wilson’s White World: The Foundation of Central–Eastern European Nation-States after World War I
# Rado Ištok, Colonial Goods and Commodity Racism in Czechoslovakia 1918–1938
# Małgorzata Litwinowicz, Experience and Appropriation. Everyday Practices of Migrants from Polish Lands and State’s Propaganda in the Interwar Period.
Day 2 (5th Sept.)
Session 2A 10:oo–11:45
# Introduction by the partnering institution: Lena Dellywater, Science Campus Eastern Europe – Global Area, University of Leipzig
# Jana Kantoříkova, Popular Classics and Less Popular Views: Translating Colonial Fantasies in the Czech Lands and the Question of (self-)Africanisation
# Łukasz Zaremba, Where Do the Cannibals Live? Transnational Colonial Imagination in 1930’ Poland
Session 2B 12:oo–2:oo
# Wacław Forajter, Deadly Whim. Race and Sovereignty in ‘Killing Time’ by Hajota
# Piotr Puchalski, The Postcolonial in Poland’s Entanglements in Africa in the Twentieth Century: A Historical Perspective
# Sofia Gavrilova, Russian Authoritarian Imaginaries. Developing New Spatial Imaginaries and Everyday Strategies through Geographical Education
Lunch
Session 2C 3:3o–5:3o
#Zoltán Ginelli, ‘We Never Had Colonies’: Episodes in the Global Histories of Colonialism and Anti-Colonialism in Hungary before the Second World War
# Marta Grzechnik, Sea, Overseas Connections, and Aspirations of Global Status – the Case of Interwar Poland
# Dorota Kołodziejczyk, Whose Colonies, whose Fantasies? The Polish pre-WWII Colonial Project in the Light of Postcolonial Discourse
Summary and final discussion 5:3o–6:oo
The conference took place at the Institute of Polish Culture, University of Warsaw, main campus, Krakowskie Przedmieście 26/28, Warsaw.
Abstract and Bio (alphabetical order)
Lena Dellywater, Science Campus Eastern Europe – Global Area, University of Leipzig
In her introduction, Lena Dallywater presents the perspectives of the Leibniz ScienceCampus “Eastern Europe – Global Area” (EEGA) and discusses how the approach, which addresses the overarching question of the positioning of Eastern European actors through and within global processes, conflicts and a new world order, speaks to the theme of the conference. EEGA brings forth research that explores the region’s interconnectedness with and imprints on the global sphere while acknowledging the reciprocal impacts that these engagements brought about in Eastern Europe itself. On the basis of the studies presented on day one of the conference, these two facets, positioning one-self and being positioned, are being elaborated in regard to colonial entanglements. With a view on sources and methodologies, research gaps and potentials for collaborative research from a transregional, interdisciplinary perspective are outlined.
Lena Dallywater is a researcher and coordinator of the Leibniz ScienceCampus “Eastern Europe – Global Area” (EEGA) at the Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography Leipzig, Germany. Her research focuses on transnational intellectual history, (Pan-)African philosophy, aesthetics and literature, and modes of Black solidarity in a global perspective. Recent publications include “African intellectuals in processes of intercultural transfer”, in: M. Espagne and M. Middell (eds.), Intercultural Transfers and Processes of Spatialization, Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2022, pp. 131–158; “‘Black fire’: conceptualisations of black liberation and engaged views of African and black aesthetics in the United States and South Africa”, Third text 34 (2020), 4–5, pp. 551–567; “In search of ‘African aesthetics’: academic perspectives on art, culture and the African way of appreciating”, in: A. Sonderegger (ed.), African thoughts on colonial and neo-colonial worlds: facets of an intellectual history of Africa, Berlin: Neofelis-Verlag, 2015, pp. 45–65. As an editor, she has, among others, published Southern African liberation movements and the global cold war ‘East’: transnational activism 1960-1990, Berlin: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2019, and Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and Africa: new perspectives on the era of decolonization, 1950s to 1990s, Berlin: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2023, both together with Chris Saunders and Helder Adegar Fonseca.
Dagnosław Demski, Whose Legacy is it? Tracing Ethnographic Shows in Central and Eastern Europe
The cultural phenomenon of exhibiting non-European people in front of European audiences in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries occurred mainly in the metropolises of the western part of the continent. Nevertheless, travelling ethnic troupes and temporary exhibitions of non-European people could also be seen in Central and Eastern Europe. In the first part of the speech, I will present the main data about the ethnographic shows in Central and Eastern Europe, from the end of the 19th century to the 1920s and 1930s. I will focus on the main routes and the cities where the events were more popular than in others. The groups, the type of the shows were organized by western impresarios (with some exceptions) and usually occurred as extensions of the routes coming from Berlin or Vienna. However, visiting Eastern European cities they arranged themselves in new configurations depending on the local opportunities. Therefore, in the second part of my presentation I will focus on the dynamics of changes in the representation of non-European ethnographic shows there and the motivations, goals and expectations of those who brought them so far. The presentation will also touch upon the tracing of the ethnographic shows and their relations to museum collections in the context of organizing knowledge in this time, and finally the question of whose legacy it is today.
Dagnosław Demski, PhD, ethnologist, associate professor and head of the Centre for Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology at the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw. His interests include the broad areas of Central and Eastern European and South Asian studies. His research focuses on ethnic studies, acting, performance, constructing otherness and difference through visualization.
Ben Dew, Polish Historical Writing in Britain, 1830-1918: Conceptualising Empire
Key to the activities of the group of Poles who fled to Britain in the years following the November Uprising of 1830/31 were a series of attempts to promote the study of Polish history. Indeed, historical narratives – both published works and lectures – were one of the principal mechanisms that patriots employed in their attempts to garner British financial and political support for Polish causes. This paper will explore the development of Polish historical discourse in Britain from its emergence in the 1830s through to the re-establishment of an independent Polish state in 1918. The focus of the discussion will be on ideas of empire, specifically the ways in which Polish polemicists and their British supporters sought to develop a critique of the imperial practices of Russia, Prussia and Austro-Hungary in order to appeal to the government and populace of another imperial polity (Britain).
Ben Dew is an Associate Professor in Cultural History at the Centre for Arts, Memory and Communities, Coventry University, UK. His research is principally concerned with European historical writing, with particular reference to Britain and Poland. He is the author of Commerce, Finance and Statecraft: Histories of England, 1600-1780 (2018) and the editor of Polish Culture in Britain (2023) and Historical Writing in Britain (2014).
Wacław Forajter, Deadly Whim. Race and Sovereignty in ‘Killing Time’ by Hajota
The text presents a plot of the novel in the context of Frantz Fanon, Giorgio Agamben, and Achillé Mbembe’s theories (race as the social construct, the concept of homo sacer, colonial necropolitics). Such methodology comes form the fact that eponymous „killing time” also refers indirectly to the action of killing in the literal sense: the victim is a native who drinks a huge amount of alcohol given to him by a bored and entertainment-seeking white man. This narrative demonstrates how race hierarchies rule colonial society and how it’s linked with the struggle for recognition and complex dialectics of attraction and repulsion. The conducted analysis will ultimately make it possibile to detect the logic controlling the representation and, after the comparison with the other texts concerning the same subject, to draw some general conclusions about the attitude of Poles towards colonial violence in the tropics.
Wacław Forajter – Associate Professor at University of Silesia in Katowice. The author of five books and several dozen articles in Polish scientific periodicals. His research interest concentrates on 19th-century history, theory of literature, anthropology of culture, and postcolonial theory. Email: waclaw.forajter@us.edu.pl
Sofia Gavrilova, Russian Authoritarian Imaginaries. Developing New Spatial Imaginaries and Everyday Strategies through Geographical Education
In my paper I focus on the monopolized system of the geographical education in contemporary Russia, tracing its routes back to the Soviet school system established in 1930s, and Soviet curriculum. I analyze the way internal and external spatial imaginaries are developed in contemporary Russian textbook, conceptualizing them as ‘neo-imperial’, and discussing to which extent they reproduce the Imperial and Soviet imaginaries.
Sofia Gavrilova (Researcher, Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography) is a human and political geographer, and a critical cartographer. Sofia got her PhD at 2019 from the University of Oxford and has published her monograph Russia’s Regional Museums. Representing and Misrepresenting Knowledge about Nature, History and Society at Routledge last year. Sofia is working on the questions of epistemological independence in the knowledge production in the former Soviet space, and on the questions of Russian embodied imperialism in the former Soviet republics.
Zoltán Ginelli, ‘We Never Had Colonies’: Episodes in the Global Histories of Colonialism and Anti-Colonialism in Hungary before the Second World War
Global history has often ignored how race and coloniality articulated Eastern European economic, structural, and world-systemic positions. While Westcentric knowledge regimes focus exclusively on Western colonialism, the exceptionalist narrative of Eastern Europe ‘without colonies’ has relegated ‘innocent whites’ outside of global colonial history. This talk will refute these approaches by exposing the role played by race and coloniality in Hungary’s semiperipheral integration to the capitalist-colonial world economy between the mid-19th century and the 1940s – the era of Hungary’s opening up to global colonialism during ‘high imperialism’. By introducing the concepts of ‘semiperipheral whiteness’, ‘colonial escapism’, and ‘transcoloniality’, the talk argues for intellectual and political urgency in unraveling these often-silenced histories and re-embedding Europeans who ‘never had colonies’ within a structural, world-systemic, and decolonial analysis of global colonialism.
Zoltán Ginelli (Ludovika University of Public Service, Budapest, Hungary) is a geographer and global historian based at the University of Public Service in Budapest, Hungary. He follows a world-systemic and decolonial approach to study the global histories of Hungarian coloniality and the relations between Eastern Europe and the Global South. In 2020, he founded the social media group Decolonizing Eastern Europe, and in 2021, he co-curated the exhibition ‘Transperiphery Movement: Global Eastern Europe and Global South’. In 2022, he joined the Advisory Board of the artistic project MANIFEST, in which he has been studying Hungarian relations to the transatlantic slave economy. He is also a member of the Decolonizing Development COST Action. Currently, he is finishing his book ‘The Global Histories of the Quantitative Revolution’ and a co-written book with James Mark and Péter Apor on the global histories of race and coloniality in Hungary for Cambridge University Press.
Marta Grzechnik, Sea, Overseas Connections, and Aspirations of Global Status – the Case of Interwar Poland
After the First World War Poland regained independence and access to the Baltic Sea. The latter had both a pragmatic dimension (building the navy and merchant marine, development of seaports and sea trade, etc.) and a symbolic one. This symbolic dimension associated access to the sea with Poland’s transformation from a nation of farmers to one of seafarers, modernisation, catching up with Western Europe, civilizational development, and even overseas expansion and acquiring colonies. This paper aims for present the construction and promotion of the Polish maritimity in the interwar period as a project to gain legitimisation as a not only independent, but modern, European nation equal to its western neighbours and a global player.
Marta Grzechnik is an assistant professor at the Institute of Scandinavian and Finnish Studies, University of Gdańsk, Poland, and a founding member of the International Border Studies Center at the same university. She is a historian with research interests in the Baltic Sea region and Northern Europe, borderland studies, regional history, and colonial history. She obtained her PhD in History and Civilisation from the European University Institute, Florence in 2010. In 2012–2016 she was a postdoctoral researcher in the programme “Baltic Borderlands: Shifting Boundaries of Mind and Culture in the Borderlands of the Baltic Sea Region” at the University of Greifswald; in 2018–2019 German Kennedy Memorial Fellow at the Center for European Studies at Harvard University, USA; in 2020 Visiting Scholar at the Center for Global History at Freie Universität in Berlin. Email: marta.grzechnik@ug.edu.pl
Rado Ištok, Colonial Goods and Commodity Racism in Czechoslovakia 1918–1938
The paper will address the circulation, advertising and packaging of the so-called ‘colonial goods’ such as tea, coffee, cocoa, tobacco, cotton or silk in interwar Czechoslovakia (1918–1938). It will interrogate the colonial imagery and the association of certain commodities with the bodies of Black, Indigenous and People of Colour through the concept of commodity racism as theorised by Anne McClintock. The paper will also raise questions about possibilities of sensitive approaches to exhibiting or re-publishing offensive and discriminatory content which the above mentioned examples represent.
Rado Ištok is a curator, art writer, and editor. He is the curator of the Collection of Modern and Contemporary Art at the National Gallery in Prague, Czech Republic. Together with Renan Laru-an, Piotr Sikora and Tereza Stejskalová, he was one of the curators of the 2nd edition of the biennaleMatter of Art (2022) in Prague, Czech Republic. Previously, he was the curator of the European Cooperation Project4Cs: From Conflict to Conviviality through Creativity and Culture at the Nida Art Colony of the Vilnius Academy of Arts, Lithuania (2018–2020). Recent exhibitions include Eva Koťátková: My Body Is Not an Island, National Gallery Prague, Czech Republic (2022–2023, co-curated with Sandra Patron); All That Is Solid Melts into Water, Uppsala Art Museum, Uppsala, Sweden (2022); Ala Younis: High Dam: Modern Pyramid, VIPER Gallery, Prague, Czech Republic (2020); The Spectral Forest, Nida Art Colony, Lithuania (2020); Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyễn: Black Atlas, Július Koller Society in Bratislava, Slovakia (2019). Editorial work includes the biennale reader Soft Spots (Spector Books 2022), exhibition catalogue The Spectral Forest (Kirvarpa 2021), e-publication Dwelling on the Threshold (Nida Art Colony 2020). Together with Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyễn he co-edited the book Crating the World (Athénée Press 2019), and with L’Internationale he co-edited the e-publication Decolonising Archives (L’Internationale Online 2016). He contributes to Artforum International, Flash Art, Art+Antiques, Artalk as well as academic publications, most recently to Cultures of Silence: The Power of Untold Narratives (Routledge 2023) edited by Luísa Santos.
Jana Kantoříkova, Popular Classics and Less Popular Views: Translating Colonial Fantasies in the Czech Lands and the Question of (self-)Africanisation
European avant-garde is well known for its captivation by the “Global South”. Avant-garde artists, empowered by scientific and technological advances, rethink previous modernist discourses and invent new codes. However, alongside “progressive” works celebrating black Africa, primitive art and the idea of bringing continents together, the book market offers translations of 19th century Western colonial novels anchored in pseudo-scientific discourses on race and racial mixing. What is happening to this legacy in the 1920s? The aim is therefore to focus on translations of French classics, especially on Alexandre Dumas’ George, at a time when Czech writers were already creating their own works of art with mixed-race characters, people who unite continents while belonging nowhere.
Jana Kantoříková received her PhD in Slavic Philology, History of Czech Literature and Literary Theory at the Charles University and the University of Regensburg (2018). Currently, she is Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research Fellow at the Humboldt University of Berlin and she is working on her postdoctoral project Blackness Imagery in the Construction of European Identity/ies: The Case of the Czech Lands in a Transnational Perspective. She is also an associate member of the Research Centre Eur’Orbem: Cultures and Societies of Central, Eastern and Balkan Europe (Sorbonne University/CNRS). Her research focuses on European Modernism and cultural transfers between France, Germany and the Czech lands. She has contributed to several collective monographs, e.g. Angst in European Symbolism (Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2020), and has published in scientific journals such as “Revue des études slaves”, “Revue russe”, “eSamizdat”.
Dorota Kołodziejczyk, Whose Colonies, whose Fantasies? The Polish pre-WWII Colonial Project in the Light of Postcolonial Discourse
Pre-war colonial fantasies developed in Polish culture and public discourse present a truly challenging object of study (Zajas, Healy, Wojda) – a country which had just regained independence In 1918 got seriously involved in a project of claiming a colonial status for itself. This seemingly contradictory situation calls for an analysis drawing on the problem of periphery as derivative and lagging behind the centre in its own self-perception. In my analysis, I want to look at some of Arkady Fiedler’s pre-WWII writings on colonial spaces and on Polish colonial ambitions for Madagascar, the main location of the Polish colonial fantasy. I want to investigate what mechanisms of orientalization, tropicalization (representation of the tropics as fantastic, alluring, inviting exploration, and racialization operate in these writing. Subsequently, I will explore some methodological issues regarding the usefulness of the paradigms of postcolonialism for such an analysis, point out the probable weak spots and propose alternate, adjusted methodology.
Dorota Kołodziejczyk is Associate Professor at the Institute of English Studies, University of Wrocław, Poland. She is Chair of Olga Tokarczuk Ex-Centre. Academic Research Centre, director of the Postcolonial Studies Centre and board member of the Postdependence Studies Centre, an inter-university research network. She has published on postcolonialism, comparative literature and translation studies. Her recent publications include East Central Europe Between the Colonial and the Postcolonial in the Twentieth Century (co-edited with Siegfried Huigen), Palgrave 2023; guest-editing of the European Review (with Siegfried Huigen): Cultural Landscapes in Central and Eastern Europe After WW2 and the Collapse of Communism (2022) and New Nationalisms: Sources, Agendas, Languages (2021); “Through the Iron Curtain: The Geopolitics of Writing (with Mirja Lecke), in: The Palgrave Handbook of Cold War Literature (2020); Postcolonial Perspectives on Postcommunism in Central and Eastern Europe (Routledge 2016, 2018), (co-edited with Cristina Sandru),and numerous articles. Board member of the Palgrave Macmillan “New Comparisons in World Literature.”
Małgorzata Litwinowicz, Experience and Appropriation. Everyday Practices of Migrants from Polish Lands and State’s Propaganda in the Interwar Period
In my presentation I would like to focus on state propaganda of interwar Poland and applied strategies of using migrants’ experience as argument supporting colonial projects of the state. Numerous migration from Polish territories to Brasil started in the end of XIX century and was continued in the 20. We can see it as grassroot movement of subalterns, first of all driven by economic pressure, not involving notions such as “polishness”, “Polish culture” at all. In second Polish republic these efforts were “employed” by official policy – so I would like to explore tension between “vernacular” and “state” colonial ideas and practices.
Małgorzata Litwinowicz, Assistant Professor at Institute of Polish Culture (University of Warsaw, Poland). Primary fields of research include 19th century history of Polish and Lithuanian cultures, problems of modernity and modernization, in particular issues related to media transformations and inventiveness. Currently working on a project devoted to “domestication” of the Baltic Sea in Polish culture and the interwar period and cultural history of national parks in Poland in the same period.
Agata Łuksza, Black Effigies in the Nineteenth-Century Polish Culture. Methodological Reflections on Racial Fantasies and Performative Blackness in the Absence of Afro-Diasporic People
My paper is an invitation to reflect upon the methodology of research on the process of racialization and historical conceptualizations of racial fantasies (Zantop 1997), particularly about blackness, in Central-Eastern European societies in which Afro-Diasporic people were almost absent. I turn to the history of theatre and cultural performances in Polish lands in the nineteenth century and investigate selected cases of black effigies (Roach 1996) and performative blackness (Ndiaye 2022) informed by European tradition of blackface. My aim is to determine their relation with dominant ideas among Poles about real African and Afro-diasporic people as well as their impact on the emergence of Polish colonial fantasies and undertakings which become especially intense since the mid-1880s. This paper is part of a larger research project, tentatively titled Polish colonial histories in which I analyze theatre shows and cultural performances in order to conduct a broader examination of the „duress” (Stoler 2016) of the phantasmatic-aspirational „colonialism without colonies” (Keskinen et al. 2009; Lüthi et al. 2016) in Polish society. How do Polish colonial histories matter today?
Agata Łuksza is an assistant professor in the Institute of Polish Culture, University of Warsaw. She is the author of Glamour, femininity, performance. Actress as an Object of Desire (Warsaw University Press, Theatre Institute 2016) and Polish Theatre Revisited: Theatre Fans in the Nineteenth Century (University od Iowa Press, forthcoming) as well as of numerous articles both in Polish and international journals (e.g. Theatre Journal, Feminist Media Studies, Contemporary Theatre Review, Pamiętnik Teatralny, Journal of Fandom Studies). Her research interests include: the history of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century theatre, particularly theatre fandom history and women’s history; colonial and postcolonial histories; gender, body and sexuality; gothic studies and fan studies. She is a Board Member of the European Association for the Study of Theatre and Performance and the co-editor of its journal: European Journal of Theatre and Performance. She is also a member of The International Federation for Theatre Research (Historiography WG) and The Polish Society for Theatre Research (PTBT).
James Mark, Wilson’s White World: The Foundation of Central–Eastern European Nation-States after World War I
The racialised aspects of the central moment in the foundation of Central-Eastern European statehood – that is, the post-World War I political settlement which created Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia and Poland – have received very little scholarly attention. Yet the region’s self-determination and nation-building was conceptualised, enacted (and contested) as part of a broader world of colonial and racial thought. African American intellectuals and anti-colonial leaders in Africa or the Caribbean saw this clearly: the emancipation of the ‘weak and white’ Poland, Czechoslovakia, and the Baltic states, and the simultaneous denial of statehood to the ‘darker nations’, was surely an act of the defence of a white world now felt to be under threat from a rising East and anti-colonial movements in the South. Some critics notwithstanding, nationalists in the region itself often performed this commitment to a white colonial Europe: as protectors of the continent’s eastern borders from ‘Asiatic barbarism’; as potential colonists in Africa; or as bringers of white bourgeois European culture to their own ‘darker’ often poorer minorities within. The paper concludes with a history of how these ‘raced pasts’ have been erased in national memory in the region.
James Mark is a Professor of History at the University of Exeter. He has published extensively on questions of Eastern European cultures of memory, on the social and cultural history of Communism, and, most recently, works that write Eastern European history in the context of global Empires and their ends. He is author of The Unfinished Revolution. Making Sense of the Communist Past in Central-Eastern Europe (2010, Yale) and co-author Europe’s 1968: Voices of Revolt (2013, OUP), 1989: a Global History of Eastern Europe (2019, CUP) and Socialism Goes Global: The Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in the Age of Decolonisation (2022, OUP).
Piotr Puchalski, The Postcolonial in Poland’s Entanglements in Africa in the Twentieth Century: A Historical Perspective
In this talk, I address whether the Polish engagement with Africa during the interwar period can be viewed through a postcolonial lens. Through a close reading of historical sources written on the margins of Polish colonial projects and usually critical of them, I debate the genuine character (or lack thereof) of the Polish attempts to identify with the suffering of Africans, proposing a historical framework for understanding them.
Piotr Puchalski, PhD, Associate Professor of Modern History at the Pedagogical University of Kraków (Poland), where he offers courses in the history of Poland, colonial empires, international relations, and contemporary tourism. He has previously published in the Historical Journal and the Journal of Modern European History. His first book is Poland in a Colonial World Order: Adjustments and Aspirations, 1918–1939 (Routledge, 2022), and he has also contributed to the edited volume The World Beyond the West: Perspectives from Eastern Europe (Berghahn Books, 2022). His next project deals with Poland’s pre-1918 and post-1939 (post)colonial entanglements.
Łukasz Zaremba, Where Do the Cannibals Live? Transnational Colonial Imagination in 1930’ Poland
The talk is a preliminary inquiry into the popularity of a perennial colonial motif of cannibalism in the Polish 1930′. In a way characteristic of the Polish ‘colonial complex’ of that era cannibalism seems to be portrayed not (no longer) as a fact about the distant Other but as half-joke or a reminder of the Other’s distant past. Its meaning and social functions are ambiguous. Thus the paper is an exercise in reading the revisions of transnational colonial imagination occuring in the local context – in this case in a newly establishing, economically struggling country with no colonies. The talk will focus on visual representations.
Łukasz Zaremba – assistant professor in the Institute of Polish Culture, translator; specializes in contemporary visual culture and visual theory. His main projects focus on contemporary iconoclasm and other forms of conflicts over visual phenomena; and the visual ‘colonial complex’ of the Polish interwar period.
Zoltán Ginelli 